So, if I'm getting this right, you can remove a lot of chunks anywhere so that they regenerate. In that case, it might actually be possible to do it near the spawn point, but on the other side that's less populated so that we don't have to go too far to find a village. I'll propose that anyone who finds a village makes a path to it. Eventually we could have a main path that these branch out from.

Sounds good. I think there's still a lot of unexplored land and land that has been explored but hasn't been built on. You can prune the area I explored north of Phil's island leading up to the Titanic. I only built little huts there because I knew I couldn't do the journey I had set out all in one day, so those can go.

I've read that some servers are planning a great migration after the release. They're going to walk as a group for an hour or so until they find a nice location to set up a new town then set that area as the new spawn.

I spent a little time today digging a 1km tunnel through the Nether. I just need to plop down a portal, throw my inventory into a chest, step through and hope that I'm not "under" an ocean biome.

It took me about an hour to mine a 1x2x1000 tunnel (which I did near the upper bedrock layer to avoid the main caverns) and it takes almost 4 minutes to walk from one end to the other. I'm estimating that I should exit somewhere around here:

Part of me thinks it's overkill, another part wants to go another 500m.

A pre-release version of 1.8 has leaked. I'm a little wary since the source is 4chan, but it looks like it comes from Minecraft's own server and plenty of people have tried it and are saying it's legit. It's possible that it was intentionally leaked as Jeb wanted to release a beta version of it this evening for "advanced users" but couldn't as there was some major bug he couldn't fix on time.

I downloaded the jar file just in case the link gets taken down later and I'm considering trying it out on my laptop.

I tried it on my laptop, which was a bit slow. Now that Notch has given consent to use the link and confirmed that there's nothing malicious about it, I may as well try to run it on my desktop so that it wont lag so much.

Swamps don't look much like swamps but they do look very nice. However vines + surface lava = lots of fire. Biomes are much bigger. They're still not as big as I'd like but they'll do. Oceans are huge, it took me about three minutes to cross one in a boat (although, remember, the game was lagging a bit). I didn't find any NPC villages or dungeons, or see any Endermen, which I guess means I need to do some more "bug testing" later.

Still no village, but two swamps and an ocean. I am so happy about the ocean, I built one on my last map and I wasn't for doing it again.
Also, the Endermen were fun, and there's a bunch of new crap to collect (Ender Pearls, raw chicken, beef.......)

I started another new world on my desktop and went hunting for a village. After spending the first night in a small cave I made in a mountain, I went out searching the next day and found this...

I can't wait to meet the guy that lives in this house.

I found an abandoned bar/library and turned that into my new home. One night a family of Endermen appeared nearby and started stealing the wood from the farm.

Knowing that strongholds are supposed to generate near villages, I went out in search of one. I eventually found this on the border between a swamp and a desert:

The planks and cobweb indicated something was down there. I went back to the village, got prepared, came back and jumped in. There was a huge, dark ravine under there with abandoned mine tunnels intersecting with it.

Shortly afterwards I saw a small flame in the distance with no light emanating from it. Assuming this came from one of the new blue spider spawners, I freaked out and ran away like a coward. I will never go spelunking again.

My favourite part of the update so far is the new jump/critical hit mechanic, there's something deeply satisfying about jumping up in the air before hitting a cow right between the eyes with your sword. It just makes you want to yell out "By the power of Grayskull!"

I was hoping the sprint mechanic would be available, but I guess not. I'm going to have to try survival mode in this version, I was just messing around on Creative on that other one. My favorite part is that you can now apparently block with the sword. Finally, you don't have to sit there and take it when you're getting glommed by half a dozen spiders at once